"'Twas youth, my friend, and joyfulness besides,
That made me breast the treachery of Neptune's fickle tides."
When Spring came around in the year 1867 we were moved to Tubac, where we were joined by K Company of my regiment and C Company of the Thirty-Second Infantry. Tubac, considered by some to be the oldest town in Arizona, before the consummation of the Gadsden Treaty was a military post at which the republic of Mexico regularly kept a small garrison. It was situated on the Santa Cruz River, which at this point generally had considerable water in it. This was probably the reason for the establishment of the town, for water has always been the controlling factor in a settlement's progress in Arizona. The river is dry at Tubac now, however, except in unusually rainy seasons, irrigation and cattle having robbed the stream of its former volume.
At the time we were quartered there Tubac was a place of no small importance, and after Tucson and Prescott were discounted it was probably the largest settlement in the Territory. Patagonia has now taken the position formerly occupied by the old adobe town as center of the rich mining zone of Southern Arizona, and the glories of Tubac (if they can be given that name) are, like the glories of Tombstone, gone. Unlike those of Tombstone, however, they are probably gone forever. Tombstone may yet rise from the ashes of her splendid past to a future as one of the important towns of the Southwest, if the stories of untold riches near by her are to be believed.
A little to the east of Tubac and separating that town from Patagonia is Mount Wrightson, one of the highest mountains in Arizona. Nicknamed "Old Baldy" after its famous namesake in California, this mammoth pile of rock and copper was in the old days a landmark for travelers, visible sometimes for days ahead on the wagon trails. It presaged near arrival in Tucson, for in a direct line Old Baldy is probably not further than forty miles from the Old Pueblo.
We camped at Tubac during the summer and part of the winter of 1867 and I remember that while we were there I cooked a reception banquet to Colonel Richard C. McCormick, who was then and until 1869 Governor of the Territory of Arizona. I forget his business in Tubac, but it was either an electioneering trip or one of inspection after his appointment to the office of Governor in 1866.
In the early part of 1868 we moved to Fort Buchanan, which before the war had been a military post of considerable importance. It received its name from the President before Lincoln and was garrisoned by Confederates during the Civil War. We re-built the fort and re-named it Fort Crittenden, in honor of General Thomas L. Crittenden, a son of the Hon. John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, who was then in command of the military district embracing that portion of the Territory south of the Gila River. Crittenden was beautifully situated on the Sonoita, about ten miles from where I now live and in the midst of some of the most marvelously beautiful scenery to be found on the American continent. Fort Crittenden is no longer occupied and has not been for some time; but a short distance toward Benson is Fort Huachuaca, where at present a garrison of the Ninth Cavalry is quartered.
During part of 1868 I carried mail from where Calabasas is now—it was then Fort Mason—to Fort Crittenden, a proceeding emphatically not as simple as it may sound. My way lay over a mountainous part of what is now Santa Cruz county, a district which at that time, on account of the excellent fodder and water, abounded with hostile Indians.
On one occasion that I well remember I had reached the waterhole over which is now the first railroad bridge north of Patagonia, about a half mile from the present town, and had stopped there to water my horse. While the animal was drinking I struck a match to light my pipe—and instantly I ducked. A bullet whistled over my head, near enough to give me a strong premonition that a couple of inches closer would have meant my end. I seized the bridle of my horse, leaped on his back, bent low over the saddle and rode for it. I escaped, but it is positive in my mind today that if those Apaches had been better accustomed to the use of the white man's weapons I would not now be alive to tell the story.
I was a great gambler, even in those days. It was the fashion, then, to gamble. Everybody except the priests and parsons gambled, and there was a scarcity of priests and parsons in the sixties. Men would gamble their dust, and when that was gone they would gamble their worldly possessions, and when those had vanished they would gamble their clothes, and if they lost their clothes there were instances where some men even went so far as to gamble their wives! And every one of us, each day, gambled his life, so you see the whole life in the Territory in the early days was one continuous gamble. Nobody save gamblers came out there, because nobody but gamblers would take the chance.
As I have stated, I followed the natural trend. I had a name, even in those days, of being one of the most spirited gamblers in the regiment, and that meant the countryside; and I confess it today without shame, although it is some time now since I raised an ante. I remember one occasion when my talents for games of chance turned out rather peculiarly. We had gone to Calabasas to get a load of wheat from a store owned by a man named Richardson, who had been a Colonel in the volunteer service. Richardson had as manager of the store a fellow named Long, who was well known for his passion for gambling. After we had given our order we sought about for some diversion to make the time pass, and Long caught sight of the goatskin chaperejos I was wearing. He stared at them enviously for a minute and then proposed to buy them.